Squeaky Clean Wethersfield - NOT!

[SyZyGy]

H

[standish]

Tragedy knows no boundaries.

[biggianthead]

I have heard that this poor kid was found in a house on Wilcox St. in OW, inhabited by a 40ish year old guy, who lets these kids come over and use drugs in his home. God knows what else he is doing there, but if this is true, someone needs to be held accountable for this tragedy. I have also heard that Ian was not alone, and that the "friend" that was with him just took off after seeing that Ian was in trouble. Had they called 911 immediately, perhaps Ian could have had a chance of survival.

I have heard the name of the resident of the house on Wilcox St. but will not post it here, as I am going only on heresay. But if this turns out to be true, he better pray he doesn't run into me at any point. I have children, 1 of which is Ian's age, and could not even begin to fathom the anguish his family must feel. My heart goes out to his family.

[stvman]

That Wilcox St. neighborhood has a history. Look back a few years to the State of Connecticut juvenile probation officer who was selling drugs to the same teenagers he was supervising. He was the near neighbor of this current indicemt. And, for those computer novies, just do a mouse click on the big H in the prior post to get the New Britain Herald news story that contains all the names.

[Dr.Ken Sokolowski]

In today's Hartford Courant, columnist Rick Green writes about "Teen Drug Use: A Deadly Conspiracy Of Silence". Another Ian, Ian Katz, died of a drug overdose. Ian Wells of Wethersfield died of a drug overdose.

A portion of his column follows. For a while the full, on-line version will be found here. Eventually, you will need to search the Courant's archives to find it using the above information.

Courant.com

Teen Drug Use: A Deadly Conspiracy Of Silence

Rick Green
October 31, 2008

A dozen years go by and Ginger Katz keeps repeating her unbearable story. All over Connecticut, she tells parents, students and anyone else who will listen about finding her 20-year-old son dead in his bed one morning in 1996.

.....Ian was an addict, a young man who discovered heroin at the University of Hartford.

We sit in a Panera Bread on a rainy afternoon as Katz grabs my arm and looks me in the eye. I have heard this tale of kids-and-drugs and kids-and-booze a million times.

Wake up, Katz says. Pay attention to your kids. Get in their business. Lock the liquor cabinet. Don't keep secrets.....

....."There has been a tremendous code of silence," Katz responds when I ask if it seems like she has been delivering the same talk for years and things don't change. "But I see some hope. More people are talking about it."

The message is reaching some people. In West Hartford, they asked Katz, who is from Norwalk, to bring her presentation to the high schools this week. I asked Sherry Stohler, a West Hartford parent and one of the leaders of Community of Concern, a group trying to stoke public discussion about teenage substance abuse, why it is difficult to get the attention of over-committed suburban parents.

"Most parents want to believe that their children are beyond reproach," she tells me......"

At Conard High School Thursday morning, where I went to hear Katz speak, pictures of a little boy, an adolescent and then a young man flash on a screen in the front of the auditorium.

It is Ian. Dead Ian......

.....What I'm struck by is all these people who knew, for years, that Ian was spiraling into addiction. A boy who held him during a bad trip in high school. A girlfriend who dumped him because he reeked of marijuana all the time. Another who watched Ian put a gun to his head and threaten to kill himself.

There were even adults who "kept Ian's secret.".....

My comment:
Perhaps our Mayor Andy Adil and the Superintendent Michael Kohlhagen should invite Katz and/or the "Community of Concern" to come to Wethersfield to drive home her message, which all of us should take to heart and act upon.

p/s: I wanted to review the article in another paper to which Syzygy pointed at the top of this thread. The link does not work; the article has been moved to the archives; it and a later article are available there. Just follow Syzygy's Horse link and then search: "Ian Wells" Wethersfield.

[SyZyGy]

Heroin in Wethersfield!
Crack & cocaine in our suburbs!
Weed everywhere!
If not killing kids
ruining useful lives.

Perhaps Mayor Andy can use his bully pulpit to preach the hazards of recreational drugs and the cost to individuals and to society of illicit drug use and end-user supported illegal drug trade.

The New York Times: January 10, 2009

Cocaine and White Teens

By Charles M. Blow
Op-Ed Columnist


Last month, President Bush touted the results of a government-sponsored study by the University of Michigan called Monitoring the Future. It reported a broad decline in drug use among young people since 2001. This included a 24 percent drop in the overall use of illicit drugs. There was one exception he said: abuse of painkillers. But, one important metric that wasn’t mentioned, and that stubbornly resisted the downturn, was the use of cocaine.

According to data from the group that produced the report, the percentage of both black and white 12th graders who confessed to using cocaine in the past 30 days has essentially stayed flat since 2001. The major difference is that white usage outweighs black usage 4 to 1. (If you take a longer view back to 1991, when cocaine usage bottomed out following the outrageous ’80s, usage among white 12th graders since then has nearly doubled, while usage among black 12th graders has fallen a bit.)

While we turned our attention to pills being swiped from parents’ medicine cabinets, the number of youngsters snorting white lines continued virtually unabated, producing a striking consequence.

According to the most recent data from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, admissions of white teenagers to drug treatment centers for crack and cocaine abuse soared 76 percent from 2001 to 2006. Crack and cocaine was the only illicit drug category in which the number of admissions for white teens grew over this period, and in 2006 the number was at its highest level since these data have been kept. By contrast, admissions among black teens for crack and cocaine over the same period held steady. By 2006, white admissions outnumbered those for blacks by more than 10 to 1. (It should be noted that admissions for white youths abusing painkillers in 2006, while growing, was still less than half the number of admissions for those abusing cocaine that year.)

And there are ominous signs. According to the Monitoring the Future study, the risk of using crack and cocaine, as perceived by teenagers, is going down. The newly released 2009 National Drug Threat Assessment puts it this way: “The decrease in perceived risk suggests that adolescents are becoming less wary of trying cocaine, which may sustain demand for the drug in the near future.”

But, in a phone interview, David Murray, chief scientist in the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy, insisted that there was good news: a sharp rise in the price of cocaine and a drop in its purity since 2006, among other things, have cut into overall usage.

So, I thought, until policy makers put more of a focus on this issue and figure out how to reach these students, should we just hope that teens are too broke for this weak coke? I don’t think so. We need a real strategy, right now.